Category: Musings

There’s a good reason why we do what we do. Despite how it might appear, our behavior isn’t random. The challenges of life and our desire to be affirmed can bring us down broken paths that have been hidden from us. We may land on what we think is the reason for our questionable behavior, but we usually need to go deeper.  Often, what we are concluding can be A problem, but not THE problem.  As Paul confesses in Romans, “What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.”

We may not understand our actions very well. But Jesus does. And he wants to help us get underneath what we think is causing our struggles to find the real wound that is the true source. For example, my impatience to have my view heard causes me to sometimes talk over others despite my desire not to. I could chalk this up to just being an impatient person or perhaps it’s related to not being adequately heard as a child and that need has chosen now to come forward. As they say, “We bury our feelings alive.” They don’t vanish, they wait for us to deal with them.

And Jesus wants to be the Divine Medic on our route. He wants to come to every facet of our heart to set us free from the things that have hurt us, or which hold us back.  He wants us to let him lead us so we can get out of our own way when we bungle the exploration. As one of my teachers said, “Are you allowing the Lord to love you in your poverty or are you making it worse in your self-condemnation?” I have a refrigerator magnet that says, “Don’t believe everything you think.” Who says what we think is true? Sometimes we compound the problem by the things we think God is asking us to do. We must allow the actual truth of God’s abiding love to form our expectations. This will free us and shift our perspective to understand that things don’t happen to us, but for us.

We drove to the airport in the early dawn. It was dark and I was anxious as I usually am when we make this drive. I like to be earlier for flights than my husband does, so the trip can be a little torturous for me. I was also unsettled because we were leaving Bella our poodle, and my mom and dad, who are 14, 90 and 91, respectively. 

I lofted an arrow prayer asking God to prevent any hurricanes and to keep our Naples gang safe and well until our return. I made my request in a mix of guilt, fear, and confidence that God would protect my loved ones, as he always seems to do. I wasn’t negotiating, I was begging. Intercessory prayer is the official name for what I was doing. It’s a mainstay of traditional Catholic prayer and I use it frequently. It makes me feel like I’m doing something. Kind of like an early warning system for God, “Hey look over here—this situation needs your help.” 

Of late I’ve wondered about intercessory prayer. In my current spot on my faith journey, I’ve begun to focus on trying to replace my will with God’s will. The saints talk about it; surrendering our will to God’s will is key to spiritual growth.  But how does that jibe with intercessory prayer? How is seeking God’s will over and above my own, congruent with me also asking for things I think are needed? How do I square this? 

If not my first call, God is always my second. Part of my immediate work is making God my first call every time. God wants us to ask for his help. He longs for us to engage him in the smallest details of our lives. And he wants us to be reliant on him, to discard the illusion that we can do hard things, or anything really, on our own.  God doesn’t like us to think we are self-sufficient because it shuts him out. Plus, it’s not true. 

The other part of this work is to believe that God’s all-encompassing but frequently inscrutable, love for us means that God probably has a much better plan for the situation than we are capable of imagining. We may not always recognize God’s abundant love for us in the things that happen or don’t happen to us, but we can always trust that because of that love, God will bring the best thing for us to fruition at some point. 

So, I think the squaring up of asking versus trusting, is to do both. God wants us to ask him for what we want. And God wants us, in complete trust, to caveat our requests with, “If it is your will, can you help me do this or that?”  This gives God the proper respect, and an opening to do something beyond our wildest dreams.

My husband and I returned from the airport late, two nights before Hurricane Ian hit Naples on September 28th. The weather forecasters said Ian was supposed to hit Tampa, three hours north of us, so we thought we would be fine. To be safe, I reached out to a cousin with a generator who lived farther inland to see if we could stay with her should we have to evacuate. My 89-year-old mother lived a few miles away and was on oxygen so we needed somewhere to go that wouldn’t lose electricity. 

My husband, Tom and I packed a few outfits, computers and important papers, thinking we would be able to return home in a day or so after the storm passed. We left books, photos, and my journals of 20 years on low shelves that would be covered with five feet of water a day later.

This is a story about a series of unexpected miracles and how the graces we received in the face of uncertainty and loss carried us seamlessly through the difficulties of a Category 4 hurricane. The fact that we could shelter with my cousin was Miracle #1 in our saga. My cousin has a large home not endangered by rising tides.  We had power for Mom’s oxygen and CPAP machines, but we lost our connection to the Internet and cable, so we never knew where the storm was, and we couldn’t communicate with our family. 

When the trees stopped moving and the rain stopped pounding, we knew that Ian had passed. The next morning, we left early to find an Internet connection and a place to stay while we figured out our next steps. We drove a few blocks away from my cousin’s house to a parking lot where we were able to reach family in California to find out what was going on around us. We learned that we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near our homes to see the extent of the damage, and there was no electricity or running water in most of Naples, so we weren’t likely to find hotel rooms either. 

So, we headed two hours east to Ft Lauderdale, while our daughter secured a hotel room for us there.  We got to our hotel, bought several days’ worth of groceries and had a nice dinner out to celebrate surviving the awfulness and to recharge for the work we knew was to come. 

We awoke the next morning to my cell phone ringing and my dear friend Ann Marie offering us the use of her recently purchased Naples home. We could have it until Thanksgiving if need be. That was Miracle #2: we had a beautiful and comfortable place to recover. We stayed at Ann Marie’s almost three weeks.

Miracle #3 was being inspired to leave Ft. Lauderdale that very same day. Back across Alligator Alley we went; we dropped off Mom, the dog, and all our stuff at Ann Marie’s house and Tom and I headed immediately to our place on Third Street. We came in the open front door and saw that our furniture and everything in the house had been lifted by the water and slung violently. There was a quarter inch of mud from corner to corner in every room. It was odd, items from one room were now in another, photographs were ripped from frames right next to a vase that was sitting upright. It was hard to process. 

We saw a crew of five burly men with hammers and crowbars removing our walls. Our landlord, Ken, needed to move quickly to get rid of the mold so the house would not have to be condemned. We worked furiously for the next two days to get whatever was salvageable before the walls came down. We had given Ken our rent check less than a week earlier. He asked if we knew what we were going to do. We said no and he said he happened to have another rental not far away. “I’m showing it today at 4:30,” he said. I asked “Can we see it at 4?” 

We saw it and we took it on the spot. It was slightly smaller than our Third Street house, two blocks farther from the beach, and a little bit cheaper. It has a small pool and a lanai that the living room opens to, and it backs up to a big yard facing a small lake. It was, and is, beyond our wildest dreams. Because we left Ft Lauderdale immediately, we were where we needed to be to score a house that was better than the one we had just been washed out of.  All this in a time of scarcity. Miracle #4 – our new great house to live in.

Disaster does trigger a scarcity energy. Many people were in the same shape we were. We all needed new houses, new beds, new furniture, food, the basics. So, with a house under our belt, we moved quickly to, “What will we do about furniture?” This would be Miracle #5: Same day furniture. As unbelievable as it sounds, under the expert guidance of my mother, we went to a single furniture store, bought everything we needed to furnish the house (except rugs and the lanai furniture we now needed because of our new pool).  And it was all delivered that very afternoon. 

Three weeks after losing everything except our artwork that was above the waterline and things we could wash like clothes and dishes; we were settled in our new place. One month after that we hosted Thanksgiving and Christmas for our extended family.

This miracle narrative helped me make sense of my Ian experience and made me feel uniquely blessed. I did feel, and still do feel, that God graced us with so much abundance during that time because he wanted to encourage us and astound us. Both then and now in my remembering. 

Our five Ian miracles reconfirmed to me God’s inexplicably abundant love. They were coming at us so quickly that it seemed like we were swept along in a full-on river of care in a larger sea of uncertainty and loss. We didn’t know what would happen next, everything was day to day, and we flowed with it. We didn’t think the difficult stuff would stop coming any time soon. And we didn’t think the miracles would tap out either. And they haven’t. 

Post-pandemic energy meets promptings of the Spirit. I’ve gifted myself with a spot to share my treasures. I hope to be useful and nourishing. And not too full of myself. So I’m starting deliberately with no goals, kind of the opposite of my normal self. We’ll just see what happens and hope for grace.